Easy Recipe – Dennis Leslie

Chili Con Carne Mac and Cheese

One of my dreams is to one day own a mac and cheese food truck!

You can just about make any flavour and then toss it through macaroni and bake it. Imagine all the things you like, then mix it in with macaroni. For example, I love chili and chili con carne, mix it in with macaroni, put cheese on top and and bake it in the oven and you have chili mac and cheese. You can also have it cold like a salad like they do in the Philippines. There they have a salad with macaroni, its usually with pineapple, ham, palm seeds, cheddar cheese and coconut dressed with mayonnaise or sour cream, sounds weird but bloody tasty stuff.

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Baked Sour Dough with Brie and Chive Butter, Green Tomato Chutney

Photo by Jun Pang

So, we have been through compound butters before.

If you can’t remember, a quick re-cap. It is basically “flavoured” butter. Simply put, you take softened butter, place it in a mixer and add flavourings such as nuts, herbs etc. Depending on what you are going to use the butters for will depend on the ingredients you put into the butter for flavour. For example, chopped herbs with lemon zest will go great with flavouring fish, a little bit of Jus (refined juices from a roast, most home cooks would call it “gravy”) and some type of fruit jelly with chopped herbs would go great with grilled beef and so on.

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Wholly Duck!!

Photo by Jun Pang

I never used to like duck. I was never around it all that much growing up. Filipinos don’t normally cook with duck so I didn’t really discover it until I was cooking in a commercial kitchen. I assume that most people are the same. Most people I know haven’t really eaten a lot of duck in their lives unless of course it was in a restaurant.

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Vego Pasta with Broccolini & Goats Cheese

Pasta is one of those items you should always have in the pantry. Instant pasta is so easy to cook and there are so many good quality “fresh” dried pastas in the market, you can really have a good choice between almost every type of pasta from your normal spaghetti right through to lasagne sheets.

There is another use for lasagne sheets other than in lasagne’s. When I was a young apprentice, I remember how much it surprised me when I was shown another use for lasagne sheets. The chef cooked a chef’s meal by simply heating a pan really hot, cooking lasagne sheets, ripping it into smaller strips and browning it in a pan until it’s slightly “crispy” then adding all the other ingredients through for flavour such as the shallots, garlic and chilli. Simple dish, quick and using only the ingredients available in the kitchen.

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